Sorry for the Group Email

It’s 437.5km from Bronte, Sydney, to Port Macquarie. I know this because we drove the entire way in the world’s smallest rental car. Our rental car was a brand new Toyota Yaris, which we promptly named Wombat on account of its snub nose, widely-spaced eyes and curved back end. The car, I learned at the Hertz desk, was brand new: the milometer proudly announced 15km when I first turned the key, making it the newest car I’d ever driven. Even better, the stereo sported a socket we could plug our iPod into.

Unexpectedly, it turned out to be big enough to hold the gear we would camp up the Australian coast in and eventually take to New Zealand. We relieved our housemates, Sim and Rachel, of their camping chairs, tent, teatowels and a pair of pillows, bade sad farewells, and set off.

I felt every inch of that 437km. Wombat’s accelerator was positioned in such a way that at 100km – our average speed, roughly speaking –my ankle was permanently cocked at a painful angle. The thing about extremely long car journeys – particularly those made on long, largely empty expanses of road – is that there’s plenty of time to experiment. Operate the accelerator with your left foot? I have. It’s easy, as long as you don’t need to break. Steer by touching the steering wheel once every 200 yards? Fine, as long as you see the corners coming.

We arrived in Port Macquarie with an hour to spare before the sun went down. We bagged a shady spot in a $22 a night campsite and set up our tent. Twenty minutes later and we were inaugurating our new camp cooker and polishing off a large bottle of beer. This was not camping as I knew it.

Camping, you see, should be hard. I know this because when I was eleven, my family and I went on holiday to north Wales. Since then, every time a comedian brings up the ubiquitous rainy camping holiday, I wince. Rainy Camping Holidays might be the stuff of cheap yucks for warm, tipsy clubgoers, but for me they’re a painful reality.

When I went to Wales with my family it rained literally every day of the two weeks we were there. The sole exception was the last day, when the sun beamed with surprising strength on the waterlogged ground. It was as if God Himself was giving us the finger.

I had borrowed a tent from my best friend Chris. Chris was a splendid chap, but I can only surmise that he knew little about tents. The one man, polythene monstrosity I was lumbered with leaked torrentially, and the campsite we were on offered little in the way of flat ground. So when it didn’t rain, the blood ran to my head in a rough approximation of a stroke. When it did rain, which was often, the water ran downhill. Now, when anyone mentions waterboarding on the news, I nod sympathetically. I don’t care what they did. I’ve been there.

All I’m saying is I was surprised when we woke up the next morning in a dry, still-standing tent.

Port Macquarie enjoys a long, beautiful stretch of beach, three restaurants (two of which were closed), and a three kilometre distant lighthouse. We toured the beach, established the opening hours of every restaurant, and visited the lighthouse in a single day. I would, while we’re here, recommend Flynns Bookshop Café, where we bagged copies of Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Big Island and Absurdistan by Eric Campbell. They may not know much about apostrophes, but Flynns had plenty of seaside reading.

Port Macquarie also has a koala hospital. The juvenile in me hoped for a place with an intensive care ward and marsupials in tiny arm casts, and my gurning inner idiot wasn’t disappointed. Information boards in the entrance showed koalas in various states of poor health, including one in a small, tragic, purple cast. Yes!

There are free tours every day, and it turns out that for all my idiotic sniggering, koalas are worryingly close to being officially endangered, thanks to a multitude of threats including dogs, cars and swimming pools. (Koalas are decent swimmers, apparently, but have little success when it comes to pool ladders.)

There was a tour, in which a vaguely-marsupial looking woman named Maree took us around the hospital to meet those koalas well enough to live outside. We met koalas (through a fence – koalas can inflict a nasty scratch if they feel threatened) who had had unfortunate encounters with dogs, cars, and one with Chlamydia. Koalas can get it, apparently.

What gets me about koalas, though, is that they are the embodiment of unassumingness. Take this story, for instance. A woman near Port Macquarie kept a tree in her back garden stocked with food for koalas. Koalas are personable little beasts, you see, and having them around would be, I suppose, not unlike having a clutch of self-sufficient, quiet children pottering around. One day she left her back door and front door open simultaneously. The two doors were immediately opposite each other, and no sooner had a koala wandered in front of her front door and spied the food laid out than it blundered directly through the house, straight past the owner, and into the back garden. It didn’t blink as it passed between her legs and her telephone stand. Unassuming, no?

From there, it was as simple as figuring out our self-igniting gas cooker (excellent, since you ask), brewing pasta for two nights straight and hoping that we’d figure out to how to cook something more adventurous before we left for New Zealand. We spent our last night poring over a map to Byron Bay, and hoping for lunchtime restaurants.

Dave is growing an uncommonly strong Achilles heel. Vroom.